THE GRAND PANORAMA

C. S. Lewis on the Meaning of Life

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I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else. —C. S. LEWIS, "is THEOLOGY POETRY?"

It's easy to imagine arriving at our first lunch with Lewis with questions buzzing through our heads, not knowing quite what to ask first. But perhaps the first thing Lewis might emphasize is that meaning matters.

Maybe Lewis would have thumped the lunch table to emphasize his point, causing the crockery to shudder. We might be taken aback. Weren't we the ones meant to be asking the questions? Yet Lewis is challenging us! Perhaps that's because he realized how important it is to sort this out as a first order of business. We all need to build our lives on something that is stable, solid, and secure. And until we find this foundation, we can't really begin to live properly. To use a distinction that Lewis teased out in Mere Christianity, there's a big difference between just existing and really living.

So why does meaning matter?

Human beings are meaning-seeking creatures. Deep down within all of us is a longing to work out what life is all about and what we're meant to be doing. Whether it's the university student wondering what to major in or the Christian seeking God's will or the armchair philosopher contemplating his or her purpose in the world, most of us want a reliable foundation for our lives and are asking questions that relate to it. Why am I alive? What is this life about? What is at life's core? What is my relationship to the physical world and the others around me? Is there a God, and what difference does it make?

We all need a lens through which to look at reality and make sense of it. Otherwise we are overwhelmed by it. The poet T. S. Eliot made this point in one of his poems, "Burnt Norton" (1935). Humanity, he remarked, "cannot bear very much reality." We need a way of focussing it or weaving its threads together to disclose a pattern. Otherwise everything looks chaotic—blurred, out of focus, and meaningless.

The French atheist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who shaped the thinking of many bright young things in the 1960s, saw life as pointless: "Here we sit, all of us, eating and drinking to preserve our precious existence and really there is nothing, nothing, absolutely no reason for existing." Yet it's hard to live in a meaningless world. What's the point?

Realising that there is meaning and purpose in life keeps us going in times of perplexity and difficulty. This point was underscored by Viktor Frankl, whose experiences in Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War showed the importance of discerning meaning in traumatic situations. Frankl realised that someone's chance of survival depended on a will to live, which in turn depended on being able to find meaning and purpose in hopeless situations. Those who coped best with apparently hopeless situations were those with "frameworks of meaning." These allowed them to make sense of their experiences.

Frankl argued that if we can't make sense of events and situations, we are unable to cope with reality. He quoted from the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: the person "who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how." We need a mental map of reality that allows us to position ourselves, helping us to find our way along the road of life. We need a lens which brings into focus the fundamental questions about human nature, the world, and God.

Recent studies of trauma have emphasized the importance of sustaining a "sense of coherence" as a means of coping with seemingly senseless or irrational events, particularly those which involve suffering. In other words, those who cope best are those who can see beneath the surface of an apparently random and pointless world and grasp the deeper structure of reality. The great Harvard psychologist William James pointed out many years ago that this is what religious faith is all about. According to James, we need to have "faith in the existence of an unseen order of some kind in which the riddles of the natural order may be found and explained."

Of course, some would argue that any quest for meaning is simply misguided. There is nothing to find, so there is no point in looking. Richard Dawkins, who modestly declares himself to be the world's most famous and respected atheist, insists that the universe has "no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference." We may invent meaning to console ourselves, but there is no "bigger picture." It's all a delusion, something we have made up.

I took that view myself in my late teens. I thought people who believed in God were mad, bad, or sad. I was better than that! Atheism was an act of rebellion, an assertion of my right to believe whatever I liked. Admittedly, it was a little dull. But who cared about that? It may have been austere to the point of being dreary, but it was right! The fact that it did nothing for me was proof that I had adopted it because of its truth, not its attractiveness or relevance. Yet a tiny voice within me whispered, Are things really that simple? What if there is more to life than this?

Lewis did not help me break free from this dull and lifeless worldview. Yet as I began to read Lewis from about 1974 on, he did help me in one very important way. Lewis enabled me to name what I had found wrong with atheism. He helped me to put a jumble of insights and intuitions into words. And as I struggled to find my feet and my bearings in the Christian world, he quickly became my unofficial mentor. I had never met him, yet his words and wisdom became—and have remained—important to me. I would love to have had lunch with Lewis, not so much to bombard him with questions, but simply to thank him for helping me grow in my faith.

It's time to bring C. S. Lewis into the conversation. Lewis was an atheist as a young man, yet he gradually realised that atheism was intellectually vulnerable and existentially unsatisfying. Let's find out why. Let's imagine that we're having lunch with Lewis, and one of us asks him how he came to find meaning in life—or, specifically for him, how he became a Christian. What might he say?

Lewis's Doubts about His "Glib and Shallow Rationalism"

Lewis was a convinced atheist by the age of sixteen. He was quite clear that religion had been explained away by the leading scholars of the 1910s. All the best scholarship of the day had shown that religion was just a primitive human instinct. This scholarship seemed to say, "We've grown up now and don't need this." Nobody could take belief in God seriously anymore.

His views were hardened by the suffering and violence he witnessed while serving in the trenches in the First World War. Lewis had trained in an officer-cadet battalion in Oxford during the summer of 1917, before being commissioned as an officer in the Somerset Light Infantry and posted to northern France. The suffering and destruction he saw around him convinced him of the pointlessness of life and the nonexistence of God.

Lewis's experiences during the First World War made him angry with God—even though he believed that there was no God to be angry with. Like so many disillusioned and cynical young men, Lewis wanted someone to hate, someone to blame for the ills of the world. And, like so many before and after him, Lewis blamed God for everything. How dare God create him without his permission! But his atheism did not provide him with a "framework of meaning" that made any sense of the devastation and anguish caused by the war. And he had to face up to the awkward fact that, if there was no God, blame for the war's horrors had to be laid firmly on human beings. Lewis seems to have gradually realised that the violence and brutality of the war raised troubling questions about a godless humanism as much as it did about Christianity. His "grim and deadly" atheism did not make much sense of Lewis's wartime trauma, let alone help him to cope with it.

The literature concerning the Great War and its aftermath emphasizes the physical and psychological damage it wreaked on soldiers at the time, and on their return home. The irrationality of the war called into question whether there was any meaning in the universe or in individual existence. Many students returning to study at Oxford after the war experienced considerable difficulty adjusting to normal life, which led to frequent nervous breakdowns.

Lewis himself hardly ever mentions the Great War. He seems to have "partitioned" or "compartmentalized" his life as a way of retaining his sanity. Literature—above all, poetry—became Lewis's firewall. It allowed him to keep the chaotic and meaningless external world at a safe distance and shielded him from the existential devastation it wreaked on others.

Lewis's continuing commitment to atheism in the 1920s was grounded in his belief that it was right, a "wholesome severity,"9 even though he admitted that it offered a "grim and meaningless" view of life. He took the view that atheism's intellectual rectitude trumped its emotional and existential inadequacy. Lewis did not regard atheism as liberating or exciting; he seems simply to have accepted it, without enthusiasm, as the thinking person's only intellectual option—a default position, without any particular virtues or graces.

Yet during the 1920s, Lewis reconsidered his attitude towards Christianity. The story of his return to the faith he had abandoned as a boy is described in great detail in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy. After wrestling with the clues concerning God that he found in human reason and experience, he eventually decided that intellectual honesty compelled him to believe and trust in God. He did not want to; he felt, however, that he had no choice.

In Surprised by Joy, Lewis tells us how he experienced the gradual approach of God. It was, he suggests, like a game of chess. Every move he made to defend himself was countered by a better move on God's part. His arguments against faith seemed increasingly inadequate and unconvincing. Finally, he felt he had no option but to give in and admit that God was God, becoming the "most dejected and reluctant convert in all England."

So what made Lewis change his mind? How did a hardened, dogmatic atheist become one of the greatest apologists for Christianity of the twentieth century and beyond? And what can we learn from this? Let's begin by looking at how Lewis's disenchantment with atheism began, and where it took him.

There are clear signs that Lewis began to become disenchanted with atheism in the early 1920s. For a start, it was imaginatively uninteresting. Lewis began to realize that atheism did not—and could not—satisfy the deepest longings of his heart or his intuition that there was more to life than what was seen on the surface. Lewis put it this way in a famous passage from Surprised by Joy:

On the one side, a many-islanded sea of poetry and myth; on the other, a glib and shallow rationalism. Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless.

So what did Lewis mean by this? For a start, Lewis was putting into words his growing dissatisfaction with the simplistic account of things offered by atheism. His "glib and shallow rationalism" dismissed the deep questions of life, offering only superficial responses. Atheism was existentially insignificant, having nothing to say about the deepest questions of the human mind or the yearnings of the human heart. We can prove shallow, superficial, and unimportant things. But the things that really matter—the truths by which we live, whether they are political, moral, or religious—simply cannot be proved in this way.

Lewis began to realise that he had allowed himself to be trapped inside some kind of rationalist cage or prison. He had limited reality to what reason alone could prove. And as he came to realise, reason couldn't even prove its own trustworthiness. Why not? Because we would then be using reason to judge reason. Human reason would be both judge and defendant! As Lewis later put it, "Unless the measuring rod is independent of the things measured, we can do no measuring."

But what if there was something beyond the scope of human reason? And what if this greater world dropped hints of its existence into our own world? What if an archer from that greater world were to shoot arrows into ours, alerting us to its existence? Lewis began to think that the world around us and our own experiences were full of "clues" to the meaning of the universe.

Gradually, Lewis came to realize that these hints and clues pointed to a world beyond the frontiers of reason. We may hear snatches of its music in the quiet moments of life. Or sense its fragrance wafted towards us by a gentle breeze on a cool evening. Or hear stories of others who have discovered this land and are ready to share their adventures. All these "signals of transcendence"—to borrow a phrase from the American sociologist Peter Berger—help us to realize that there is more to existence than our everyday experience. As the great British apologist G. K. Chesterton (who was much admired by Lewis) pointed out long ago, the human imagination reaches beyond the limits of reason to find its true object. "Every true artist," he argued, feels "that he is touching transcendental truths; that his images are shadows of things seen through the veil."

The Importance of Our Intuitions

Alongside Lewis the cool-headed thinker we find a very different style of thinker—someone who was aware of the power of the human imagination and the implications of this power for our understanding of reality. Perhaps one of the most original aspects of Lewis's writing is his persistent and powerful appeal to the religious imagination. Lewis was aware of certain deep human emotions and intuitions that seemed to point to a rich and enriching dimension of our existence beyond time and space. There is, Lewis suggested, a deep and intense feeling of longing within human beings which no earthly object or experience can satisfy. Lewis named this sense "Joy," and argued that it pointed to God as its ultimate source and goal. God shoots "arrows of joy" into our hearts to awaken us from a simplistic atheism and lazy agnosticism, and to help us find our way home.

Lewis explored this further in a remarkable wartime sermon, preached at Oxford in June 1941, titled "The Weight of Glory." Lewis spoke of "a desire which no natural happiness will satisfy," "a desire, still wandering and uncertain of its object and still largely unable to see that object in the direction where it really lies." There is something self-defeating about human desire, he remarks, in that what is desired, when it is actually achieved, seems to leave that desire unsatisfied. Lewis illustrates this from the age-old quest for beauty. "The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing." Human desire, the deep and bittersweet longing for something that will satisfy us, points beyond finite objects and finite persons (who seem able to fulfill this desire yet eventually prove incapable of doing so). Our sense of desire points through these objects, and points persons towards their real goal and fulfillment in God.

Atheism had to dismiss such feelings and intuitions as deluded nonsense. For a while, Lewis went along with this. Then he realized that it was ridiculous. He was locked into a way of seeing things that prevented him from appreciating their true significance. Lewis began to trust his intuitions and explore where they led him. There was, he realized, a "Big Picture" that made sense of life. It was called Christianity.

A "Big Picture": Seeing Things in a New Way

In our lunchtime conversations, Lewis would be sure to drop in some wonderful statements we would take away and relish, turning them over in our minds to make sure we had fully appreciated their depth and brilliance. Here's one he might have thrown into the conversation: "I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else."